With Medium now having 100+ followers as one criteria for getting paid, it was obvious — to me at least — that this would create some issues.

Medium had once been flooded with bots but it seems they managed to get rid of most of those. They also got rid of the people who were here looking for love in all the wrong places. Apparently they have moved over to Instagram — but that's a story for another day.

What I now see happening is that I might get a lot of follows — but absolutely no movement on the views data and almost never any reads. I know some of that is algorithm — but if 15–20 people follow me and I have absolutely not one view — to me that means they just followed me but they have no idea what I write. 

They are just following people to get followed back.

One person actually looked at a story — I know because they commented along the lines of: 

I followed you now follow me back. 

No way in hell! Your comment went the way of many other things — into the proverbial Internet trashcan.

Comments should relate to what was written. Saying things like great story follow me back is not a comment. Nor is telling me that you followed me and I should follow you back a comment. You might think it is — that's your prerogative — but I don't think it is as I said above such go into the Internet trashcan. 

I mentioned previously that there are a few people who tag something like 3 or 4 inches of other Medium writers in hopes that those people will read their basic crap. It's usually written as I'm inviting you to play or you can play along with — whatever it is that's being written. 

There were a few things like this a few years ago that were actually interesting — but there are some people who have taken it to a level of writing a poem or prose that takes up a small bit of real estate followed by that major amount or inches of tags. 

I unfollowed that person when it first started happening. I decided not to contact that person because I am a great believer in don't feed the trolls. Unfollowing didn't work, so I muted that person —  that didn't work so I blocked that person — that didn't work so I started muting all of the publications that the person was publishing in — and that didn't work. 

I finally reported that person. I have no idea what will happen —  so we will see. But after being tagged up to five times a day over a period of months it did get annoying. It took me a while as I don't like reporting people — but again I was not going to feed the troll — just like I don't answer my phone when I have no idea who's calling and have my phone set to silent for those calls!

The problem here on Medium is that I have notifications turned on to let me know if people do comment or tag me — because people do that for really good reasons —  and I didn't want to turn it off. But there are people like that one person who is tagging hundreds of names in hopes that hundreds of people will read their posts and they ruin it for others…

Then along came another thing — that I assume is going to be a “thing.”*

It's someone I followed. Their writing was interesting and so I followed them. But back to Medium and their new money making ideas. This person, like others, [too many others in my opinion] was writing about how much money they can make on Medium. 

Here’s the new *thing — instead of people talking about how much money they make from writing they're talking about how much money they make from getting other people to join Medium from their affiliate links.

This person wrote an article about the above — which I find yukky to begin with — but since they had tagged me I scanned the article. 

And what it wound up saying — among other Medium platitudes — was here's a list of people who follow me but they aren't members — so — please join and… 

please use my affiliate link [oh and here it is] 

That person has at least one follower less than they had before I saw that article. If they try this again they will get blocked and muted or reported — whichever it is that seems to work to make people stop this kind of tagging me.